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If you’ve ever found a broken link or a missing page in a website, then link rot may well be to blame. It’s a frustrating and all too frequent occurrence on the Internet. You may have spend hours looking for that golden page that has the answer to your problems, you’ve found a link to the page and description suggestion this is it – the page you’re been looking for. You follow the link and get – 404 Page Not Found. The page is not there. While certainly not the only reason for broken links, “link rot” is a common source of broken links. This occurs when the page being linked to moves or changes its name. The page linking to the renamed page still has the old address. This is the Internet equivalent of somebody giving your their address, then not telling you when they move home. This has the added frustration that you haven’t changed your page, but they are broken by somebody else renaming pages elsewhere. Sometimes the renamed page is on your site; sometimes it’s on somebody else’s. If you move pages on your site, then you have a chance of spotting and preventing errors before visitors to your site encounter a problem. This is not always possible, or even easy to do. If you have many pages, and/or a complex website structure then it's easy to miss links to the page being moved, or if the page moved is on another website, then changes to their site can break your site – without you even touching your site! As time goes by the likelihood of link rot increases. With link checking tools you can have your links automatically checked by software. In this way you don’t have to continually monitor the validity of each and every link, - you can have a software module to do it for you! This leaves you time to work on your core business, and not worry about links quietly rotting away on your website. Benefits of having a links checking mechanisms include: - Better visitor experience – less of the visitors to your website will find broken links.
- Increased confidence in deep links – allows you more scope to add deep links to other people's sites.
- More confidence in internal links – you’ll be less worried about changing your own website if you know that any errors will be quickly and automatically highlighted.
So, in summary, Link Rot occurs if page A points to B, page B changes its address, and page A continues to point to the old address of B. This often occurs when website maintainers change page B without realising that other pages link to it.
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